Labour council leader Julian Bell is known for his direct, partisan brand of Labour politics. Apparently he buys his opinions every day from the Daily Mirror for 45p.
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Those evil Tories again
Ealing’s Labour housing supremo and Islington council housing officer, Cllr Withani, seems to be happy that the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is trying to use the legal system to overturn the will of our elected government, see article here.
Apparently CPAG is challenging the national cap on the Local Housing Allowance (LHA), paid to tenants in the private rented sector, and a restriction preventing payments exceeding the cost of renting a four-bed home, regardless of household size. Does anyone remember CPAG going for judicial review in April 2009 as a result of Labour’s James Purnell limiting LHA to the five room rate following from the Acton Afghan case? Labour limits LHA and it is OK. No comment from Cllr Withani and CPAG. The Tories do it and CPAG are off to the courts. Agenda anyone? Oh yes! Don’t expect Withani to be tweeting an explanation anytime soon.
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Evil Tories?
Ken Livingstone and his campaign are all over Wandsworth and Bexley councils over their plans to charge for specialised playgrounds. In the Wandsworth case it is a fully manned adventure playground and in the Bexley case it is water play. Wandsworth are talking about charging at weekends only. Bexley are looking unlikely to act at all.
Labour voices are making it into to some kind of moral question. It is not. People have to pay for council swimming pools and leisure centres. Indeed Labour boroughs trying to balance their budgets have proposed closing adventure playgrounds. Most people would rather pay than have nothing.
Hilariously Harry Phibbs, who covers local government for ConservativeHome, has discovered that Labour Islington council charges during lunchtimes for its adventure playground. Is Islington evil? I don’t think so.
Ken Livingstone is getting ever sillier in his language. At the start of May he likened Barack Obama to a “mobster”.
On Tuesday when he travelled to Bromley he called Eddie Lister, the former leader of Wandsworth Council, “the beast of Wandsworth” and “the Ratko Mladic of local government.”
Livingstone has a track record of calling people Nazis or fascists. It is all very colourful. It is a sure sign that he is losing the argument. Silly old fool.
I have been searching the report for any proper evidence or arguments. There are none. It is simply a list of leftist, nanny-knows-best assertions and prescriptions.
If food prices do rise as suggested by Oxfam, this should lead to increased food supply which will in turn push food prices down again as supply increases. Higher food prices will almost certainly lead to better infrastructure, increased food production and greater wealth for sub-Saharan Africa.
The report fails to discuss the real problems facing people in the third world.
Democracies never have famine and never have civil wars. The Oxfam report fails to mention the word democracy. Food aid given to despots is simply wasted money. It merely increases the despots’ power of patronage. Western aid should be concentrated on making countries that work, work better. We will not increase the number of functioning countries, able to make a positive contribution, by wasting resources on the broken ones. Once the neighbours have a model to follow they will change very quickly.
Despotic and corrupt governments have leaders and politicians who are happy to steal from their own people on an epic scale. Even the worst excesses of our MPs’ expenses scandal only highlights what total angels our politicians are by comparison to those in many countries. We know what keeps our politicians honest here. A free press. Another phrase which does not appear in the Oxfam report. Why doesn’t Oxfam prescribe what works in the West? Western aid should not be given to countries without a free press.
All wealthy countries have a properly functioning legal system where contracts can be made and property ownership proven. No sensible farmer will invest in land if he doesn’t know he owns it and he can’t sell his crops. The Oxfam report is again silent on legal systems and contract formation. Western aid should be focussed on building and supporting basic legal systems and the civil legal system and land registry in particular.
Poor people need what rich people need: democracy and justice. Once these are in place all people will organise themselves quickly to sort out their food needs, to educate their children and look after the sick. It is what humans do. Aid needs to be focussed on democracy and justice first, not food aid, health and education.
Instead of recommending basic solutions which we know work in the west Oxfam essentially prescribes massive state intervention and smallholding. Oxfam is talking rubbish. Their prescriptions are actively destructive I would say and miss the obvious. Oxfam seems to be focussed on making British people feel bad and influencing the British government and other Western governments to keep spending more, most of which ends up in the wrong place.
We will most likely have 9 billion people on the planet by 2050. We need to work out how to release the talents of these 9 billion so that we can make the world work for all of us. Proposing solutions that we know don’t work for us in the West is just insulting nonsense.
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Local journalism
It is interesting to contrast the approach of three of our local news outlets to reporting the council’s Recycling Rewards scheme.
On the Ealing Today website Annamarie Flanagan really did just regurgitate the council’s press release verbatim. It was quick at least, it came out the same day.
In the Gazette Michael Russell took six days to merely re-arrange the words in the council’s press release and add his name to his work.
In contrast at the Ealing Times reporter Shane Murray took nine days to do a proper job. He called me up and another Conservative councillor, Colm Costello. Having gathered some contrary views Shane then went back to the Labour spokesman to give him the chance to rebut what was said. Shane’s article is an interesting piece of journalism which presents opposing views and brings out new facts. Well done Ealing Times. I am pleased that they have decided to invest in covering Ealing again, if only online for now.
Amusingly Cllr Mahfouz accuses me of sour grapes “because Northfield’s participation rates had fallen”. I thought that my comments were pretty measured considering what a silly piece of spin this turned out to be. According to Mahfouz’s stats the recycling participation rate in Northfield fell from 71.9% to 70.4%. I would be surprised if this was even statistically significant let alone a cause for “sour grapes”.
Northfield is consistently amongst the top wards for cleanliness and re-cycling thanks to its considerate residents. All smiles here Cllr Mahfouz.
Labour council leader Julian Bell has sent the boys round to have a word with the headmaster and chairman of govenors at Featherstone High School. Apparently they are thinking unclean thoughts about running their own affairs and the leader needs for them to be re-educated.
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How to waste £30K
I am being generous and suggesting that Cllr Bassam Mahfouz’s Recycling Rewards scheme only wasted its £30K communications budget. The £80K given in incentives to the winning wards will be reasonably well spent I am sure but I don’t see this scheme being repeated. Maybe we should praise the Labour administration for trying something new. Whilst the £80K will not be entirely wasted it might have been better spent on directly tackling participation in recycling in the weakest wards in the borough. The number are in the cabinet report here.
The council has spent £30K advertising this scheme and seen the average participation rate across the borough drop slightly from 58.37% to 58.30%. I am sure that that the margin for error is much bigger than this so we should probably just agree that the £30K has been spent to no effect.
If you look at the council’s table there are some shocking disparities across the borough. Southall Green ward participates at fully half the rate of Hobbayne. And don’t let anyone tell you that Hobbayne is some chichi middle class area which you might expect to do well.
The nine lowest performing wards, which all fail to get over the 55% mark, are strong Labour areas. Southall Green is noticeably weaker than anywhere else. I would rather that the £110K had been allocated to a small team going door-to-door around Southall Green to try to change behaviour there.
Labour would rather puff themselves up with comms spending than actually engage with their own communities. Cllr Mahfouz’s reputation for dissimulation is underlined by his quote in the press release:
This competition has shown that it is possible to improve recycling rates and a special mention must go to South Acton, which improved by such a staggering amount.
Black is white. Both Cllrs Bell and Mahfouz believe in Lenin’s dictum “A lie told often enough becomes truth”. Mahfouz lauds South Acton increasing by 6.1% whilst failing to mention that Dormers Wells dropped 6.2% and that 9 out of 23 wards went backwards and 7 stood still (less than 1% change) and only 7 showed progress.
Having been in charge of parking in the last two years of the Tory administration I have been keeping a close eye on the Parking Services function within the council over the last year, indeed I was asked to chair a scrutiny panel on CPZs in the municipal year just ended. At the last council meeting I asked the following question:
Question 37:
How many penalty charge notices were issued in the last financial year?
Answer 37:
202,255
Over the last six years the picture looks like this:
You can look up the historical data for yourself here.
On the face of it, it looks like Labour have learnt their lesson from their appalling behaviour just before they were thrown out of office in 2006 when they issued over 380,000 tickets. By the time I had finished the council was issuing only half of what Labour did in its last year. Under Labour’s Bassam Mahfouz the numbers have gone up by 4%. Mahfouz needs to ensure that this does not get out of control again.
Under the Conservatives we got the parking officers under control and stopped them from simply milking their more lucrative sites. Judging by the couple of stories in the press this week on parking it may be that Labour have let things go again, see here and here.
One of the things I did when I was in charge was that I made the council publish the data showing what tickets it had issued for each offence in each location, see here. The idea was that the council would know that it was being watched and as a side effect FOI inquiries might be reduced. It seems that this data has not been updated since December so I am anxious that the council has decided to stop being transparent in this very controversial area. I have asked officers to tell me what is going on.
I will be coming back to this area over the next couple of days.
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Bell enjoys himself
Sorry to return to my theme of yesterday but Labour council leader Julian Bell has been having fun this week opening a couple of projects that I got onto the council’s capital budget when I was the portfolio holder. Note the common theme here: spending people’s money on things that people use. After he has run out of Tory projects to open Cllr Bell will be reduced to opening new council offices, computer systems and a car park in Southall. Ooops.
Phil Taylor 